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Sony's new 400mm f/4.5 and 600mm f/6.3 primes come in lighter and cheaper than the Nikon lenses they closely resemble, and that puts a real decision in front of anyone who shoots birds and wildlife. Long glass is usually the most expensive and physically demanding part of a wildlife kit, so a few hundred grams and a four-figure price gap can shape what you carry for years.
On paper, the comparison looks lopsided. Jan Wegener, a professional bird photographer for more than 20 years, puts the Sony FE 400mm f/4.5 GM OSS against the Nikon NIKKOR Z 400mm f/4.5 VR S and finds the Sony about 170 g lighter and roughly $800 cheaper. The gap widens with the longer pair, where the Sony FE 600mm f/6.3 GM OSS is almost 400 g lighter and about $1,500 less than the Nikon NIKKOR Z 600mm f/6.3 VR S. Wegener also points out that the Nikon 600mm PF is already easier to hand-hold than popular zooms like the Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS or the Nikon NIKKOR Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR. He says that matters most if you travel a lot or hand-hold a lens all day.
Hand-holding the Nikon lenses, the viewfinder image looks nearly as steady as it would on a tripod, which makes it easier to keep a small bird framed and follow its movement. Wegener says he can start filming hand-held video at almost any moment with either Nikon lens, even with a teleconverter attached, and get footage that's essentially shake-free. The Sony setup gives a less settled view, and smooth hand-held video takes more work. He attributes this to how each system pairs in-body stabilization with the lens' own stabilization rather than to the lenses alone, and he notes that Sony's active stabilization modes help at the cost of an extra crop. For stills at slow shutter speeds, the gap shrinks a lot, so anyone who mostly shoots video should weigh this point more heavily than someone who only shoots stills.
The two 400mm lenses turn out to be close to twins. The Sony is a little lighter, the Nikon a little shorter, both focus down to 2.5 m (8.2 ft), and Wegener sees no meaningful difference in image quality. With a 1.4x teleconverter, both give excellent results wide open at f/6.3, and they still produce very good images with a 2x at f/9. The 600mm pair is where real differences show up. The Sony matches the 400mm lenses' 2.5 m minimum focus distance, while the Nikon needs 4 m (13.1 ft), which makes it harder to fill the frame with a small songbird.
A decade ago, 600mm of reach in a prime meant an f/4 lens weighing over 3 kg, a five-figure price, and usually a monopod or gimbal. Canon's RF 600mm f/11 IS STM in 2020 and Nikon's 400mm f/4.5 after it showed how many people would happily give up some light for a lens they could carry all day. Nikon's 600mm f/6.3 PF followed, using a phase Fresnel element to shorten the barrel, and Sony is now competing in the same space with a more conventional optical design. Better high-ISO sensors and tools like Lightroom's Denoise feature, which arrived in 2023, make that trade much easier to accept, since an f/6.3 lens at ISO 3,200 cleans up far better now than it would have a few years ago. In practice, a hand-holdable prime changes how you work. You can follow a bird along a creek, shoot from a kayak, or pivot quickly when something flies past, all things a tripod-bound 600mm f/4 makes awkward.
Wegener goes on to argue that the camera bodies may separate these systems more than the lenses do. Sony holds an edge in speed and tracking consistency, with raw pre-capture and 30 frames per second on bodies like the Sony a1 II, compared to 20 fps raw on the Nikon Z9. Nikon's subject detection, meanwhile, has become very good at finding small birds in a busy frame and can match or beat Sony in that area. Pricing gets more complicated too. At list prices, the Sony combination comes out cheaper in five of six pairings, but Nikon's current camera discounts flip a lot of those numbers.
Wegener's final pick between the two systems is in the video above.
English (US) ·